HOME | DD

Description
We've reached the penultimate episode , "Sabretooth", set in Paraguay 1 million years ago, the middle Chibanian, or for South American land mammal ages, the early Ensenadan. Man, I remember loving this episode and rewatching it the most as a kid, because it starred Smilodon, but then I grew up and gained an appreciation for the other episodes highlighting far more obscure but equally fascinating Paleogene animals, while gradually realizing that this one had plenty of flaws, not just in terms of accuracy but also in terms of storytelling, presentation and some of the more severe shafting in WWB, to the point that I would actually consider this the weakest episode of WWB, and maybe even one of the weakest entries in the WW series, due to its unique combo of faults. My feelings towards the WW, in general, are ambivalent, but "Sabretooth" is a unique beast.

Now let me make it clear, this is still a well-made episode from a filmmaking and aesthetic perspective, the Smilodon puppet might just be the most convincing animatronic in the series, and it does have a lot of cool moments (if you don't think too hard about them), but I can't just ignore its multitude of flaws, including what I consider the worst creature in WWB (the terror bird). As usual, I'll try to categorize all the broad issues and give each one a fine comb over, but first, let me mention something about the setting of this episode. The Pleistocene fossils record of South America, like in the rest of the world from this most recent epoch, is a rich one, but something that is often overlooked is how it was more diverse and segregated than people think, as were its biomes. While we're all familiar with the lush, tropical plains featured here, many of the most iconic ice age giants of South America; Smilodon populator, Macrauchenia patachonica, Megatherium americanum, Doedicurus clavicaudatus, and (not featured here) Toxodon platensis and Glyptodon clavipes are primarily or exclusively known from the southern half of South America, namely Argentina and the Lujan Formation, going up to the southern fringes of Brazil, while the northern half of the continent was largely inhabited by relatives of the former mega-herbivores; Xenorhinotherium, Mixotoxodon, Glyptotherium , and Eremotherium (the latter three having radiated into southern North America), while S. populator overlapped with S. fatalis. Of course, this wasn't always clear due to taxonomic splitting and lumping in the past.

Paraguay is within reasonable proxy of the southern cast's known geographic ranges, but M. americanum and Doedicurus seem to have been restricted to the drier and more temperate latitudes in and around Argentina, and fossils of M. americanum, along with S. populator and M. patachonica have been found as far south as the Milodón Cave in the far south of Chile, so these beasts were adaptable and even inhabited the chilly latitudes at the very tip of South America. So while the tropical habitat shown in "Sabretooth" makes sense for the specific location, it would be very novel and interesting to see this cast placed in a cooler, more temperate enviroment , akin to the Torres del Paine National Park , alongside the likes of guanacos, rheas, and pumas. But okay, let's talk about the episode's issues.

A) Awesomebroism and, for lack of a better term, a conventional narrative trying to beat its way into this documentary. Yes, I'm serious. Now, this series and WWD before it, always had the issue of most of the animals being a bit nosier than animals would realistically be, especially the T. rex in "Death of a Dynasty", who sometimes roars for no real reason other than posing, and this issue is very prevalent in "Sabretooth". When Half Tooth chases away the terror birds in the opening, when he steals the kill of another one, and at the end when he defeats the surviving brother, all of those instances have him standing tall and proud and roaring at the top of his lungs Lion King-style. An awesome visual for sure but that's NOT how big cats act, this is pure Hollywood right there. Interestingly, we might have evidence that Smilodon was indeed capable of roaring despite not being related to panthers, based on the structure of its hyoid bone, but if you've ever seen tigers, lions, or leopards roaring (I'm talking threat roars, not territorial roars ), it's not like in the movies and cartoons. They make quick, explosive roars, usually while crouching and/or making mock charges , they don't do the "Simba atop of Pride Rock" thing where they lift their head high and go "ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOARRRRR!!!!!!", and watching this with adult eyes, it's pretty ridiculous that we have a documentary endorsing this entirely fictitious big cat trope. In reality, it's ungulates like camels or cervids who actually do this, letting out long bellows with their heads held high and mouths wide open.

And secondly, I've already criticized "Whale Killer" for having a forced happy ending, but this issue is exaggerated here, as this episode actually has "antagonists" in the form of the brothers, and has to resort to manipulative presentation in order to paint Half Tooth as the "hero" of this story, when this really should have been a raw, entirely objective showcase of (hypothetical) Smilodon social structure and hierarchy. There is some of that (decapitated kittens) but it's largely in service of this conventional narrative with protagonist-centered morality. As these are real animals living in nature, we have no reason to root for Half Tooth and want the brothers to get punished, unless you're anthropomorphizing these animals. We can "root" for the main animal to make it through and/or feel sad when they don't, like with the juvenile indricothere or the old Ornithocheirus in WWD, and even when big, scary predators died, like the Postosuchsu and Liopleurodon, those weren't presented as karmic deaths but rather as tragic, poignant ones emphasizing nature's mercilessness. And even if you were anthropomorphizing these saber-toothed cats (mind you, this is a documentary), it still doesn't work, since the brothers don't do anything to deserve karmic retribution. They slaughtered cubs, yes, but that's normal Smilodon behavior in this context. Just how do you think Half Tooth took over the clan? By kindly adopting the cubs sirred by his predecessor, who he usurped and possibly mortally wounded?

Yeah...this does not work. "Sabretooth", narratively speaking, is the odd one out in WWB, as it's simultaneously trying to be a nature documentary but also a more conventional narrative, which just results in it falling short in both categories. Oh, and given that Half Tooth has sirred all the younger females in the clan, one can assume that once he regained control of the clan, there was some Sweet Home Alabama shit going on and those cubs you see at the end are inbreed and suffering from health issues, creating a serious genetic bottleneck in the clan. There's a reason lion society is as brutal as it is and each king's reign is relatively short-lived. Masacaring cubs and then mating with their mothers is harsh, but so is incest and compromising the population's genetic diversity. I think I've proven my point by now, the episode really should have ended with the brothers maintaining control of the clan and Half Tooth dying a sad, poignant death, alone and disgraced, because that's realistically what would have happened.

B) Okay, but how does WWB's Smilodon fare in terms of accuracy? Not too well either. Let me start with the positives. Anatomically, this is a pretty accurate representation of Smilodon populator; the long face, the stocky build, and powerful front limbs , and it even has some novel features to indicate that it's not part of any modern feline lineage, like the strange shape of its ears, while still being recognizable as a felid. There is remarkable attention to detail here , however, the darker brown pelt and jaguar/clouded leopard-like rosettes, while they aren't unreasonable per se, would make more sense for a sabretooth living in forested or shrubby enviroments, like S. fatalis. Being primarily found on open grasslands, I would put my money on S. populator having a lighter, uniform-colored pelt akin to a lion or cougar. And I really don't like the short manes given to the males, I just find the look unappealing, though that might just be because it's too on the nose, given how Smilodon social structure is portrayed here.

Now, obviously, WWB often had to look at modern mammals as inspiration for their fossil mammals, and it's usually done well, paying homage to extant species without being too blatant about it. This is not the case here and it's something that bugged me even as a kid; the Smilodon populator are literally just lions with saber teeth, everything about them is copied from African lions to a T, with no nuance or deviation, even if lion-like behavior contradicts the fossil evidence. Honestly, I think it's done to the point that it trivializes this being Smilodon, as other than the titular cat looking different, this story feels identical to any random dramatized documentary about a lion pride, minus the contrived "happy ending". Firstly, the hunting scene with Macrauchenia isn't very representative of how Smilodon would have hunted; these were stocky ambush predators with short bobtails, they weren't agile or balanced enough to run over long distances and makes sharp turns like a panther (who have long tails for balance), and they aren't shown using brutish, bear-like tactics to wrestle their prey down. Smilodon was the roided-up bruiser of the Felida family, built to wrestle down prey much large than themselves, but here, we see two adult females needing to work together to bring down an undersized Macrauchenia (more on that later).

And furthermore, while there is some (controversial) evidence of Smilodon fatalis being social to some extent (like individuals surviving crippling injuries), no expert who supports the group-hunting hypothesis suggests that Smilodon lived in lion-like prides. Though soft tissue features like manes obviously don't fossilize, Smilodon (according to most studies) were not very sexually dimorphic felids, unlike today's panthers, where males are up to twice the size of females, including Panthera leo. I understand that there is a limited pool of reference as as far cooperative hunting in extant cats goes, though there are also male cheetahs forming coalitions, it doesn't change the fact that the available evidence does not favor what's depicted in WWB, and it honestly just dilutes their portrayal of Smilodon, both in terms of accuracy as well as creatively, by just making them saber-toothed lions. I think this was a place where speculation was truly needed, like showing a more novel group structure or at least making some deviation from lions, like showing the alpha males leading the hunt.

Those are the main isses I have with WWB's Smilodon but there are still some inaccuracies/outdated elements worth citing. One, the episode puts S. populator at "over 300 kg" which is a reasonable weight for an average individual but we have since found evidence pointing towards even greater sizes, like a huge skull from the Doloroes Formation in Uruguay thought to belong to an individual weighing an estimated 435 kg. But on the same note, the narrator calls it "the most powerful big cat of all time". It's nebulous, sure... but it's worth pointing out that although S. populator is a definitive contender for the largest known felid, estimating the weight of extinct animals is fraught with difficulty and basically impossible to gauge with absolute certainty, along with evolution not having any goals like creating record-holders, and several other fossil cats like Machairodus horribilis , Machairodus lahayishupup , Amphimachairodus kabir and the well-known Panthera atrox (the American lion ) are known to have reached comparable sizes to S. populator, likely representing a max size limit for felids. Interestingly, these giant felids cluster in either the Late Miocene (upper Tortonian-Messinian) or the Mid-Late Pleistocene, with the Pliocene-Early Pleistocene lacking any giant machairodonts (as mentioned in the last post ). The dawn sabertooth (Smilodon gracilis) wasn't even the largest cat in North America initially, as it coexisted with the larger and equally bulky scimitar cat Xenosmilus hodsonae, until the latter vanished around 1 million years ago (though its fossils are rare).

Furthermore, the narrator says Smilodon migrated into South America 3 million years ago, or 2 million years ago, if I misinterpreted the line, but either is inaccurate. We don't have a good idea of when Smilodon gracilis (the basalmost species) traveled into South America, but the species first emerged in North America 2.5 mya (the start of the Pleistocene and the ice ages), and the earliest record we have of it from the south comes from the Mesa Formation in Venezuela, thought to be between 1.8-1.2 million years old (Calabrian). Most fossils of Smilodon from South America are from the Upper Pleistocene and usually represent S. populator and less frequently S. fatalis, the former having evolved on the plains of South America and the latter in the shrublands of North America. Contrary to what older sources claim, there is no evidence of Smilodon having encountered, let alone outcompeted the saber-toothed metatherian Thylacosmilus atrox, who died out during the end of the Pliocene and might not even have overlapped with Smilodon temporally, let alone geographically. A similar issue crops with the terror birds, speaking of which...

C) Ughh...this one is pretty bad. I made it no secret that I have a very dim view of WWB's terror bird, and consider it the worst creature in the series, because pretty much everything about it is broken. Not only is it a hodgepodge of outdated terror bird tropes with a dash of questionable creative choices, but unlike other outdated portrayals in the series (Gastornis, Andrewsarchus, Basilosaurus), it doesn't even make up for it by being cool or memorable, or being treated with a sense of awe and majesty, quite the opposite really. The episode mostly treats it with disdain, as a straw loser to make Smilodon look more badass. Let's break down every single issue with this portrayal.

Which will be done in the second part...

Description
We've reached the penultimate episode , "Sabretooth", set in Paraguay 1 million years ago, the middle Chibanian, or for South American land mammal ages, the early Ensenadan. Man, I remember loving this episode and rewatching it the most as a kid, because it starred Smilodon, but then I grew up and gained an appreciation for the other episodes highlighting far more obscure but equally fascinating Paleogene animals, while gradually realizing that this one had plenty of flaws, not just in terms of accuracy but also in terms of storytelling, presentation and some of the more severe shafting in WWB, to the point that I would actually consider this the weakest episode of WWB, and maybe even one of the weakest entries in the WW series, due to its unique combo of faults. My feelings towards the WW, in general, are ambivalent, but "Sabretooth" is a unique beast.

Now let me make it clear, this is still a well-made episode from a filmmaking and aesthetic perspective, the Smilodon puppet might just be the most convincing animatronic in the series, and it does have a lot of cool moments (if you don't think too hard about them), but I can't just ignore its multitude of flaws, including what I consider the worst creature in WWB (the terror bird). As usual, I'll try to categorize all the broad issues and give each one a fine comb over, but first, let me mention something about the setting of this episode. The Pleistocene fossils record of South America, like in the rest of the world from this most recent epoch, is a rich one, but something that is often overlooked is how it was more diverse and segregated than people think, as were its biomes. While we're all familiar with the lush, tropical plains featured here, many of the most iconic ice age giants of South America; Smilodon populator, Macrauchenia patachonica, Megatherium americanum, Doedicurus clavicaudatus, and (not featured here) Toxodon platensis and Glyptodon clavipes are primarily or exclusively known from the southern half of South America, namely Argentina and the Lujan Formation, going up to the southern fringes of Brazil, while the northern half of the continent was largely inhabited by relatives of the former mega-herbivores; Xenorhinotherium, Mixotoxodon, Glyptotherium , and Eremotherium (the latter three having radiated into southern North America), while S. populator overlapped with S. fatalis. Of course, this wasn't always clear due to taxonomic splitting and lumping in the past.

Paraguay is within reasonable proxy of the southern cast's known geographic ranges, but M. americanum and Doedicurus seem to have been restricted to the drier and more temperate latitudes in and around Argentina, and fossils of M. americanum, along with S. populator and M. patachonica have been found as far south as the Milodón Cave in the far south of Chile, so these beasts were adaptable and even inhabited the chilly latitudes at the very tip of South America. So while the tropical habitat shown in "Sabretooth" makes sense for the specific location, it would be very novel and interesting to see this cast placed in a cooler, more temperate enviroment , akin to the Torres del Paine National Park , alongside the likes of guanacos, rheas, and pumas. But okay, let's talk about the episode's issues.

A) Awesomebroism and, for lack of a better term, a conventional narrative trying to beat its way into this documentary. Yes, I'm serious. Now, this series and WWD before it, always had the issue of most of the animals being a bit nosier than animals would realistically be, especially the T. rex in "Death of a Dynasty", who sometimes roars for no real reason other than posing, and this issue is very prevalent in "Sabretooth". When Half Tooth chases away the terror birds in the opening, when he steals the kill of another one, and at the end when he defeats the surviving brother, all of those instances have him standing tall and proud and roaring at the top of his lungs Lion King-style. An awesome visual for sure but that's NOT how big cats act, this is pure Hollywood right there. Interestingly, we might have evidence that Smilodon was indeed capable of roaring despite not being related to panthers, based on the structure of its hyoid bone, but if you've ever seen tigers, lions, or leopards roaring (I'm talking threat roars, not territorial roars ), it's not like in the movies and cartoons. They make quick, explosive roars, usually while crouching and/or making mock charges , they don't do the "Simba atop of Pride Rock" thing where they lift their head high and go "ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOARRRRR!!!!!!", and watching this with adult eyes, it's pretty ridiculous that we have a documentary endorsing this entirely fictitious big cat trope. In reality, it's ungulates like camels or cervids who actually do this, letting out long bellows with their heads held high and mouths wide open.

And secondly, I've already criticized "Whale Killer" for having a forced happy ending, but this issue is exaggerated here, as this episode actually has "antagonists" in the form of the brothers, and has to resort to manipulative presentation in order to paint Half Tooth as the "hero" of this story, when this really should have been a raw, entirely objective showcase of (hypothetical) Smilodon social structure and hierarchy. There is some of that (decapitated kittens) but it's largely in service of this conventional narrative with protagonist-centered morality. As these are real animals living in nature, we have no reason to root for Half Tooth and want the brothers to get punished, unless you're anthropomorphizing these animals. We can "root" for the main animal to make it through and/or feel sad when they don't, like with the juvenile indricothere or the old Ornithocheirus in WWD, and even when big, scary predators died, like the Postosuchsu and Liopleurodon, those weren't presented as karmic deaths but rather as tragic, poignant ones emphasizing nature's mercilessness. And even if you were anthropomorphizing these saber-toothed cats (mind you, this is a documentary), it still doesn't work, since the brothers don't do anything to deserve karmic retribution. They slaughtered cubs, yes, but that's normal Smilodon behavior in this context. Just how do you think Half Tooth took over the clan? By kindly adopting the cubs sirred by his predecessor, who he usurped and possibly mortally wounded?

Yeah...this does not work. "Sabretooth", narratively speaking, is the odd one out in WWB, as it's simultaneously trying to be a nature documentary but also a more conventional narrative, which just results in it falling short in both categories. Oh, and given that Half Tooth has sirred all the younger females in the clan, one can assume that once he regained control of the clan, there was some Sweet Home Alabama shit going on and those cubs you see at the end are inbreed and suffering from health issues, creating a serious genetic bottleneck in the clan. There's a reason lion society is as brutal as it is and each king's reign is relatively short-lived. Masacaring cubs and then mating with their mothers is harsh, but so is incest and compromising the population's genetic diversity. I think I've proven my point by now, the episode really should have ended with the brothers maintaining control of the clan and Half Tooth dying a sad, poignant death, alone and disgraced, because that's realistically what would have happened.

B) Okay, but how does WWB's Smilodon fare in terms of accuracy? Not too well either. Let me start with the positives. Anatomically, this is a pretty accurate representation of Smilodon populator; the long face, the stocky build, and powerful front limbs , and it even has some novel features to indicate that it's not part of any modern feline lineage, like the strange shape of its ears, while still being recognizable as a felid. There is remarkable attention to detail here , however, the darker brown pelt and jaguar/clouded leopard-like rosettes, while they aren't unreasonable per se, would make more sense for a sabretooth living in forested or shrubby enviroments, like S. fatalis. Being primarily found on open grasslands, I would put my money on S. populator having a lighter, uniform-colored pelt akin to a lion or cougar. And I really don't like the short manes given to the males, I just find the look unappealing, though that might just be because it's too on the nose, given how Smilodon social structure is portrayed here.

Now, obviously, WWB often had to look at modern mammals as inspiration for their fossil mammals, and it's usually done well, paying homage to extant species without being too blatant about it. This is not the case here and it's something that bugged me even as a kid; the Smilodon populator are literally just lions with saber teeth, everything about them is copied from African lions to a T, with no nuance or deviation, even if lion-like behavior contradicts the fossil evidence. Honestly, I think it's done to the point that it trivializes this being Smilodon, as other than the titular cat looking different, this story feels identical to any random dramatized documentary about a lion pride, minus the contrived "happy ending". Firstly, the hunting scene with Macrauchenia isn't very representative of how Smilodon would have hunted; these were stocky ambush predators with short bobtails, they weren't agile or balanced enough to run over long distances and makes sharp turns like a panther (who have long tails for balance), and they aren't shown using brutish, bear-like tactics to wrestle their prey down. Smilodon was the roided-up bruiser of the Felida family, built to wrestle down prey much large than themselves, but here, we see two adult females needing to work together to bring down an undersized Macrauchenia (more on that later).

And furthermore, while there is some (controversial) evidence of Smilodon fatalis being social to some extent (like individuals surviving crippling injuries), no expert who supports the group-hunting hypothesis suggests that Smilodon lived in lion-like prides. Though soft tissue features like manes obviously don't fossilize, Smilodon (according to most studies) were not very sexually dimorphic felids, unlike today's panthers, where males are up to twice the size of females, including Panthera leo. I understand that there is a limited pool of reference as as far cooperative hunting in extant cats goes, though there are also male cheetahs forming coalitions, it doesn't change the fact that the available evidence does not favor what's depicted in WWB, and it honestly just dilutes their portrayal of Smilodon, both in terms of accuracy as well as creatively, by just making them saber-toothed lions. I think this was a place where speculation was truly needed, like showing a more novel group structure or at least making some deviation from lions, like showing the alpha males leading the hunt.

Those are the main isses I have with WWB's Smilodon but there are still some inaccuracies/outdated elements worth citing. One, the episode puts S. populator at "over 300 kg" which is a reasonable weight for an average individual but we have since found evidence pointing towards even greater sizes, like a huge skull from the Doloroes Formation in Uruguay thought to belong to an individual weighing an estimated 435 kg. But on the same note, the narrator calls it "the most powerful big cat of all time". It's nebulous, sure... but it's worth pointing out that although S. populator is a definitive contender for the largest known felid, estimating the weight of extinct animals is fraught with difficulty and basically impossible to gauge with absolute certainty, along with evolution not having any goals like creating record-holders, and several other fossil cats like Machairodus horribilis , Machairodus lahayishupup , Amphimachairodus kabir and the well-known Panthera atrox (the American lion ) are known to have reached comparable sizes to S. populator, likely representing a max size limit for felids. Interestingly, these giant felids cluster in either the Late Miocene (upper Tortonian-Messinian) or the Mid-Late Pleistocene, with the Pliocene-Early Pleistocene lacking any giant machairodonts (as mentioned in the last post ). The dawn sabertooth (Smilodon gracilis) wasn't even the largest cat in North America initially, as it coexisted with the larger and equally bulky scimitar cat Xenosmilus hodsonae, until the latter vanished around 1 million years ago (though its fossils are rare).

Furthermore, the narrator says Smilodon migrated into South America 3 million years ago, or 2 million years ago, if I misinterpreted the line, but either is inaccurate. We don't have a good idea of when Smilodon gracilis (the basalmost species) traveled into South America, but the species first emerged in North America 2.5 mya (the start of the Pleistocene and the ice ages), and the earliest record we have of it from the south comes from the Mesa Formation in Venezuela, thought to be between 1.8-1.2 million years old (Calabrian). Most fossils of Smilodon from South America are from the Upper Pleistocene and usually represent S. populator and less frequently S. fatalis, the former having evolved on the plains of South America and the latter in the shrublands of North America. Contrary to what older sources claim, there is no evidence of Smilodon having encountered, let alone outcompeted the saber-toothed metatherian Thylacosmilus atrox, who died out during the end of the Pliocene and might not even have overlapped with Smilodon temporally, let alone geographically. A similar issue crops with the terror birds, speaking of which...

C) Ughh...this one is pretty bad. I made it no secret that I have a very dim view of WWB's terror bird, and consider it the worst creature in the series, because pretty much everything about it is broken. Not only is it a hodgepodge of outdated terror bird tropes with a dash of questionable creative choices, but unlike other outdated portrayals in the series (Gastornis, Andrewsarchus, Basilosaurus), it doesn't even make up for it by being cool or memorable, or being treated with a sense of awe and majesty, quite the opposite really. The episode mostly treats it with disdain, as a straw loser to make Smilodon look more badass. Let's break down every single issue with this portrayal.

Which will be done in the second part...